By Musheera Ashraf
Saharanpur, Uttar Pradesh: India’s contemporary narrative of national development is almost universally narrated through the language of massive numbers. Promoters of the nation’s technological leap point to billions of Unified Payments Interface (UPI) transactions recorded every single month, seamless online government services, and extensive welfare schemes that are directly linked to mobile applications. Yet, far removed from this glowing metropolitan vision lies a different, quieter reality. In rural villages where mobile devices are frequently shared among family members and passwords are often guessed rather than secured, women continue to stand at the absolute margins of a digital world that has shifted forward much faster than they could follow.
This stark disparity is visible daily in places like the rural outskirts of Saharanpur in Uttar Pradesh. Here, thirty-five-year-old Musayyada, a widow living in a village situated about ten kilometres from the city center, begins her arduous workday long before the urban areas wake up. On a recent morning, she boarded a crowded public tempo at dawn, traveling to the local gas agency to demand answers as to why her domestic cooking gas cylinder subsidy had not been credited to her account for three consecutive months. By the time she arrived at the office, a long queue of similarly frustrated residents had already formed outside the locked gates.
When her turn finally arrived to speak with the agency staff, she was met not with assistance, but with an unexpected commercial demand. The personnel informed her flatly that her subsidy would only be released if she purchased a new gas pipe, which they insisted was strictly "mandatory." Musayyada blinked in disbelief at the counter. She tried to explain her situation to the staff, pointing out that she had replaced her equipment only a month prior and had no practical need for another item. The reply she received was rehearsed, cold, and entirely inflexible: it was mandatory, they claimed, and even if she did not need it at the moment, she could save it to use later.
The mandatory pipe cost her two hundred rupees—an amount that roughly equates to the total cost of a day’s worth of meals for her family of four. To absorb such an expense is a heavy burden for a household that survives on thin margins.
Musayyada carries a second-hand mobile phone that she managed to purchase for twenty-five hundred rupees, a sum she paid off in difficult installments over time. Reflecting on the economic sacrifice required just to maintain basic connectivity, she notes that a phone has become an absolute necessity in modern life. Even if her family has to skip a meal, she explains, they feel compelled to keep a phone running.
However, her functional utility of the device is severely restricted. She can use it only to receive incoming calls and to dial her daughter, who lives in another village. For virtually every other digital task, she is forced to walk over to the local shopkeeper next door, relying on his goodwill and availability even to book her regular LPG gas cylinders. When asked how she manages to remember her daughter’s phone number without being able to read or write, she laughs shyly and points out a simple mnemonic: the number ends with two zeroes.
Across rural landscapes in India, women frequently depend entirely on neighbours, local shopkeepers, and male family members to execute the most elementary digital tasks. These hands, which are predominantly male, handle everything from booking household cooking gas to checking the status of government welfare subsidies. While a deep sense of social trust often fills the wide gap left by systemic digital illiteracy, this reliance introduces profound risks to personal privacy and financial security.
Illustrating these hidden dangers, another family in the region experienced a troubling ordeal when an elderly woman continuously received phone calls from complete strangers. It was later discovered that a relative had used her personal mobile number to register multiple unvetted online accounts without her knowledge or explicit consent. Sixty-two-year-old Savitri recalls the confusion and distress caused by the incident, noting that she had no idea why strange callers were addressing her by someone else’s name. These occurrences may register as minor, isolated incidents within the grand national narrative of India’s rapid digital expansion, but they vividly demonstrate how easily the boundary between community trust and deep vulnerability can blur.
Ten years into the landmark Digital India mission, a persistent gendered digital divide continues to dictate the terms of modern participation, establishing a clear line between those who are empowered to navigate the new systems and those who must stand outside the closed doors. Data indicates that nearly forty percent fewer rural women own smartphones compared to their male counterparts. Furthermore, among the subset of women who do manage to own phones, a significant portion exercises little to no independent control over how those devices are used or monitored.
This digital chasm becomes even sharper when examining the realm of digital finance. Men are statistically more likely to perform UPI financial transactions than women, creating a wide gap of nearly fourteen percentage points. Official national UPI statistics often fail to reflect this stark difference because transaction data is rarely disaggregated by gender. Nevertheless, professionals working directly within the digital payments ecosystem readily acknowledge the underlying imbalance. Back in 2023, a senior official with Google Pay publicly noted that women accounted for less than thirty percent of total UPI active users. A similar estimate was echoed the following year by a representative of the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI). These already low national percentages drop even further when focused specifically on semi-urban and deeply rural demographics.
The hesitation to embrace digital finance is rooted in profound anxieties. A fifty-year-old schoolteacher residing in Saharanpur possesses a fully functional UPI application installed on her smartphone, yet she steadfastly refuses to use it for transactions. Raising a common and practical fear, she asks what would happen if her hard-earned money were accidentally transferred to the wrong recipient, wondering aloud who would step forward to return it. Instead, she routinely hands her personal phone over to her son whenever she needs to make a digital payment, explaining that if anything were to go wrong with the transaction, she would inevitably bear the blame. Consequently, she concludes that it is far safer not to try at all.
Fear functions as an unseen but remarkably powerful barrier across the countryside. Numerous rural women report that they actively prefer dealing in physical cash not because they lack general awareness of how technology works, but because they lack personal confidence in their ability to avoid catastrophic mistakes. They have heard frequent local stories of financial fraud, stolen passwords, accidental payment reversals, and mobile phones getting permanently blocked after too many consecutive failed access attempts. For these women, making a digital mistake carries social and economic consequences that feel vastly heavier than physical financial errors.
Sita, a thirty-year-old newly married woman living in the region, summarizes the dynamic with stark simplicity. She has never booked her own domestic LPG cylinder because she does not own a mobile phone of her own. Her access is limited to occasionally borrowing her husband’s device strictly to watch videos on YouTube. If she were to attempt managing household digital chores and something went wrong, she notes that she would have to face criticism from everyone around her.
The fear of making a mistake is not an irrational or imagined anxiety. It is shaped by years of social conditioning, of being repeatedly told to exercise extreme caution, of shouldering the blame for household errors, and of operating within a social structure that provides very little room for safe experimentation or failure. Meanwhile, digital governance services continue to march relentlessly forward. Government welfare schemes are increasingly tethered to dedicated mobile applications. Subsidy disbursements require periodic digital updates. SIM cards demand mandatory biometric revalidation. Commercial banks insist on rigorous Know Your Customer compliance, while LPG agencies push customers to check their delivery statuses exclusively online. Every single newly added administrative step demands a baseline of digital confidence that many rural women have simply never been allowed or encouraged to build.
Online content creators frequently capture other subtle layers of this complex reality through digital platforms. Recently, an Instagram creator known by the handle @lifeofpuja addressed her audience in a widely viewed video, observing that no matter how hard she works or how many followers she manages to earn, she is still primarily recognized in society merely as someone’s wife or daughter-in-law. Rural women across Saharanpur echo this sentiment in much quieter ways. They routinely fail to receive any formal recognition or social validation for the new skills they manage to pick up, as their primary identity remains inextricably tied to the domestic sphere rather than their personal digital capabilities.
Representatives from Sarvothanam, a Delhi-based non-profit organization dedicated to online safety and digital literacy training, point out that the core issue extends far beyond basic literacy to encompass systemic dependence. A representative for the organization explains that women who do not fully understand how to operate their own mobile phones must inevitably rely on others for assistance. However, those very same individuals who provide help can also misuse their privileged access. Personal photographs, private messages, and even one-time passwords (OTPs) are frequently shared or accessed without the female owners fully comprehending what is happening to their personal data.
Despite these formidable challenges, glimmers of grassroots change are slowly beginning to unfold across the rural landscape. In a village located near Deoband, Rahima, who holds the distinction of being the first college graduate in her family, spends her time attempting to teach basic digital tasks to her mother and the other women in her immediate neighborhood. She explains that she patiently shows them how to properly open incoming SMS text messages, how to locate saved contacts in their phone books, and how to identify suspicious, potentially fraudulent links. It is admittedly slow and painstaking work, but it is driven entirely by a sense of genuine care and community solidarity rather than fear.
Parveen, a dedicated social worker who actively assists rural women throughout the Saharanpur district of western Uttar Pradesh, emphasizes that the path forward demands significantly more active handholding, sustained community-level training programs, and women-led digital learning circles. Echoing this perspective, a digital rights volunteer working alongside rural women in the region stresses that true digital empowerment is about much more than merely distributing hardware devices. Rather, it requires ensuring that women feel genuinely safe, confident, and firmly in control of their digital lives.
India’s overarching digital journey is racing ahead at a breathtaking pace, yet a substantial portion of the population continues to walk cautiously behind it. The women residing in these villages are not engaged in an ideological resistance against modern technology. Instead, they are simply trying to navigate a socioeconomic world that has evolved far faster than their access, their confidence, and their institutional trust.
For these women, true autonomy is not measured in the number of smartphone applications installed or financial transactions successfully completed. Instead, it is measured in quiet, personal victories: successfully answering an incoming message without outside help, checking a government subsidy status independently for the very first time, or daring to press a mobile button without the paralyzing fear of failure. Until these modest victories become an ordinary part of daily life, the national digital future will continue to leave its women standing outside the door.
(Musheera Ashraf is a Laadli Media Fellow. The opinions and views expressed in this report are strictly those of the author. Laadli and UNFPA do not necessarily endorse the views expressed herein.)